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There’s one experience that I’ve always dreamed of and that’s starting fresh. One of the things that prevented me from coming out sooner is that very dream. It’d be so much easier if I could just start fresh, and have no predefined expectations of who or what I was. Unfortunately for me, by the time I was ready to come out of the closet and realized it was even a possibility I was out of school and well into my career.

I have been unemployed for six months now, and just got my first job offer since I was let go by my previous employer. I won’t go into the specifics about why, because it’s not really important and there are a lot of factors that led up to it, though my gender and gender presentation was certainly a factor. I haven’t been unemployed for this long since I was a teenager, and the job market now is very different than it was back then, despite many factors are quite similar. My gender, however, is a huge change that needs to be talked about.

Today marks my two year anniversary of starting HRT. Unfortunately I don’t have a big celebratory post to go along with the special occasion like I did for my first anniversary. However, I did want to share another timeline photo. I do have a few more blog posts in the works, but they aren’t polished enough to post quite yet.

A photo taken on March 10th at year 0, year 1, and year 2.

Thanks to everyone who’s read my posts, sent me comments (both good and bad), and gave me precious upvotes on Reddit.

I’ve always loved the concepts and themes of cyberpunk and transhumanist stories. Many of my favorite movies as a teenager followed these themes, most notably The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell (the anime, not the recent Hollywood abomination). Unfortunately what I loved most about cyberpunk and transhumanist stories were often either extremely minor plot points, or not touched on at all. Rather than focusing on the personal implications of such concepts, most stories that touch on these subjects revolve around bettering the world.

I’ve briefly talked about it in past blog posts, but my childhood in the late 80s and throughout the 90s was a huge factor in preventing me from coming out earlier in life than I ended up doing. That isn’t to say that I knew I was transgender when I was that young, but rather that time frame left me with a deeply seeded binary view of gender and what it meant. Before I could come out as transgender, I would have to break free of that limited notion of gender, and gender expression.

Being transgender means having a strange dichotomy between the image of yourself as you are, and the image of yourself as you want to be. That dichotomy gets even stranger as your transition progresses, and the image that has been burned into your mind as who you are no longer matches your actual physical appearance. I’ve shared my timeline before, but the gradual changes from before I came out to a year into HRT are one thing, and the before and after of nearly two years since coming out is a stark contrast.

I often try to avoid the political. I avoid it with my family. I avoid it on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve avoided it with this blog. I quietly unfriend and unfollow people who post blatant political posts that I vehemently disagree with. If you were pro-Trump at any point in time that I saw on my social media feeds, then I likely removed you months ago, because we simply can’t be friends on those feeds. This applies to family, friends, and acquaintances alike. It’s nothing personal, or, well I suppose I should say that it wasn’t personal until recently.

Seven months ago I wrote about names, and what the term deadname meant to me. Today, my old name is officially dead. I still hate the word, but there’s something cathartic about saying it. The person isn’t dead. I’m still here and writing these blog posts, but the name is currently in the process of being buried.

Content warning: Not safe for work. Discussions of porn on the internet, including rape. If you’re my parents, you should probably skip this one.

The internet has a strange obsession with gender swapping, and the past week has been rife with with it thanks to a Nintendo Direct in which it was announced that Toadette would be a playable character in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. In addition to being playable, Toadette would have a unique powerup, the Super Crown, which would turn her into Peachette, a mashup of Princess Peach and Toadette.